Possibly Related Posts

WordPress, the good people who host this site and provide the blogging functionality, have just introduced a new feature called Possibly related posts — read all about it in this possibly related announcement — which automatically generates links to… er, yes, you’ve got the idea: possible related posts.

It’s a neat idea — as Matt, WordPress’ head honcho, says in his announcement, sometimes you can get to end of a great post and you’re left wondering, “Where next?”

This feature tries to answer that question… but begs the question, what if those links go somewhere the post’s author would rather not send you?

At the moment it’s all or nothing: there’s no way to moderate the links generated, no way of turning it on or off on a per-post basis; the links are not flagged up as auto-generated, hence this explanation; and they only show when the post is viewed as a standalone page, not in the main blog. More fine tuning is clearly needed but I’m leaving it turned on for the moment because it may be helpful and it’s supposed to work both ways: other blogs should feature auto-generated links to bring people here.

Please note that no endorsement of any auto-generated link is implied. If you run into an inappropriate link, please let me know either by a reply to this post or via the Feedback page.

Thank you.

Update, 28/04/2008: ‘Possibly related posts’ are now flagged ‘(automatically generated)’ and clearly separated from the main post by a horizontal rule. Thank you, Matt, for listening and responding to user feedback!

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